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PARTISAN REVIEW
Elsa Furst:
One of the things that we're talking about here is, is psycho–
analysis a bourgeois science, and, if so, what can we do about it.
There's a kind of polarity which is coming out here. I'm not going
to
address what you call the opacity of money, which an awful lot of
clinicians feel interferes ... because of its opacity and their relation–
ship with patients, but of another kind of opacity, and that's the
opacity of science. Dr. Arlow, who represents a great deal that is most
admirably traditional in psychoanalysis, concluded his talk by
saying, "I tried to be as objective as possible as the facts allow." And
he primarily said, "We are a normal science," as you called it, right?
Now, it seems to me that one of the mystifications or one of the
things that can function as a mystification, inherent in the doctor–
patient psychoanalytic relationships, is this claim that we are a
science, that our task is the interpretation of the data into terms
which are scientific. Lacan comes in here, and since William
Phillips sent out a plea for someone to explain Lacan, I'll throw in a
little bit. I don't think he's so much obscuranticist as it's a littl e hard
to
know which side he's on at any given point, and he's very
commitled to not being committed to definitions.
It
makes it very
difficult and very maddening. Lacan is one of the many people
concerned with issues of reality, the self; and meaning is socially
defined. This is also going on in the psychoanalytic situation, and
the main thing that's happening in the psychoanalytic situation is
that two people are talking to each other and it's not that one has
superior knowledge to translate what person A says into a higher
form of discourse known as metapsychological theory.
I also want
to
bring in the whole question of the change of the
type of pathology from good old-fashioned fainting hysterics to
schizoid and narcissistic people who are, I would like to say in this
audience, us, because there has been a certain amount of harassing of
the schizoid-narcissistic personality in this community lately. I think
the most interesting thing that's happening in psychoanalysis, and I
think it is genuine, and alive, is the response to the question of how
do we as therapists need to work differently with the people who are
not presenting internal conflicts of the sort that psychoanalytic
theory was based on.
If
you look at Lacan, at people entirely within
the psychoanalytic framework, such as Kernberg, who are trying to
deal with this issue in entirely orthodox terms, you'll find something
alive happening. I think the question of whether we relate to our
patients in a demystified way is actually being hashed over and
looked at in terms of this question of how one relates to peopl e for
